In December several celebrities were forced to apologize publicly for stating on their personal blogs that they had “won” items on so-called penny auction websites when, in fact, they hadn’t. Penny auction sites, which first appeared in Germany in 2005, offer people the chance ...

Thanks to a feature that appeared on the front page of the Dec. 31 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, oidashi beya is the first topical neologism of 2013 if you don’t count “Abenomics.” It’s not clear if the term, which translates as “expulsion room,” ...

In a recent interview on the Barnes & Noble Review website promoting his latest book, historian Jared Diamond mentions how treatment of the young “varies among traditional societies just as it varies among industrial societies,” and gives examples of how some of the former ...

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In September 2007, after Shinzo Abe had abruptly quit his first stint as prime minister, sales of Shin-chan Manju, a bean-paste-filled bun named after Abe, spiked. The maker of the buns had tried to promote the product over the course of Abe’s year as ...

“Tis the season for predictions, and last week Hiromasa Yonekura, the chairman of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren), told Asahi Shimbun he believed Japan will decide in 2013 to take part in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks. Yonekura is also chairman of Sumitomo Chemical, ...

Media figures of the year: The “Right Brothers” Conservatives supposedly made a comeback in 2012, but if you believe Japan’s social outlook is basically conservative to begin with, you have to wonder what they were coming back from. The country’s fiscal policy is anything ...

Last week’s Lower House election was all about what people didn’t want — the Democratic Party of Japan — but the issue foremost in voters’ minds was the state of the economy, and new prime minister Shinzo Abe has made that his first priority ...

Occasionally in this space I refer to a financial writer called “Gucci-san” who contributes a weekly column to Aera. Apparently, he works for an investment consulting firm that does a lot of work in mergers and acquisitions. In a recent piece he said that ...

The Latin morpheme liber (free) has a lot to answer for. Take the word “liberal,” which represented a fairly clear political position until American “conservatives” demonized it. But liberals are not “libertarians.” The former are seen to favor government schemes that guarantee the welfare ...

Once upon a time television was considered much less prestigious than the movies, and then cable and other forms of pay TV showed up. Producers no longer had to think mainly about sponsors and family sensitivities because they could target programs at specific demographics. ...

Several weeks ago the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, hung around briefly after the IMF finished up its annual meeting — which happened to be in Tokyo this year — and appeared on a special hourlong edition of NHK’s in-depth news ...

People who use the Tokyu Toyoko Line, which connects Tokyo and Yokohama, may wonder why there are stations called Toritsu-Daigaku and Gakugei-Daigaku when there are no daigaku (universities) near them. There used to be a Gakugei Daigaku (Tokyo Gakugei University) but it moved to ...